Impact of Technology on Travel Agencies

This assignment delves into the profound impact of technology on the travel agency industry. It examines how advancements like social media, online travel agents (OTAs), and mobile applications have transformed the way travelers research, book, and experience their journeys. The analysis considers both the challenges and opportunities presented by these technological shifts for traditional brick-and-mortar agencies, as well as the evolving role of travel agents in a digital landscape.

Running head: INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
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1INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
Executive Summary
This report provides an investigation on how the travel business changed from the travel
agents once playing a dominant role in the travel industry to people preferring and adapting
to online travel services over the time. This report also discusses on the pros and cons of the
online travel booking method as well as the traditional brick and mortar travel agencies.
Various benefits of the use of mobile apps to both the customers as well as the travel
companies are also mentioned in this report along with highlighting the security issues of the
websites that these travel companies need to address in order to provide better protection to
their customers. Lastly, this report concludes with certain recommendations for the travel
agents that would help them to adapt and grow in the competitive market of the travel
industry alongside the online travel agencies and the online travel search engines.

2INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Discussion..................................................................................................................................4
A critical investigation into the changes from the high street travel agents to the 24 hour
online equivalent....................................................................................................................4
Evaluation of how technology changed the methods of conducting business, as compared
to the old ‘Bricks and Mortar’ businesses..............................................................................5
Advantages and Disadvantages of traditional and online booking........................................6
Critical analysis of the benefits associated with the use of mobile-apps, alerts and mobility
when selling/buying travel & tourism services......................................................................7
Discussion of the security issues associated with having a web presence.............................9
Recommendations....................................................................................................................10
Conclusion................................................................................................................................10
References................................................................................................................................12

3INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
Introduction
The tourism and travel sector comprises of various suppliers who provide travel
services to the people with the best travel experience. High street travel agents as well as
travel agencies have played and play an important role in providing the best promotion of
travel and tourism to the people (Mossaz and Coghlan 2017). Today, the travel industry is
one of the largest and the most energetic industries in the world. The travel agencies along
with the travel agents have been acting and serving as a link between the service providers
including the tour operators, airlines and hotels and the customers (Lai 2014). With the
introduction of the internet and advancement in the information and communication
technologies (ICT), many businesses including the travel industry got affected with this
change and thus adapted to the online method in order to survive in the competitive market.
This report discusses on how the ways of conducting business in the travel industry
changed over time from customers consulting the high street travel agents to now opting the
24-hour online services. It highlights how internet and the use of technology added to this
change in the approach of the customers for the travel services, leading the brick and mortar
business to suffer the most. Several advantages and disadvantages of the online booking
system as well as the traditional travel agency are also mentioned in this report. This report
also discusses the benefits of using the travel related mobile apps to both the customers and
the travel agencies as well as points out the security issues related to the travel agencies
online presence and how these issues could be tackled.

4INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
Discussion
A critical investigation into the changes from the high street travel agents to the 24 hour
online equivalent.
With the rise of digitalization, people have become more dependent and addicted to
the use of internet in their daily life for various activities ranging from socializing with
people to conducting business online. Today, with more people preferring to opt for online
booking services over the traditional way of going to the travel agents for their holiday
bookings, several of the tour and travel agencies as well as the high street travel agents
belonging to the travel industry had to suffer a great deal (Standing, Tang-Taye and Boyer
2014). While many of these agents and travel agencies succumbed to this change, many went
ahead to adapt to this change by getting themselves familiar with the use of internet and
introducing the option of online bookings to their customers. The dominant role played by the
high street travel agents in the traditional distribution of the travel booking and services
declined with the growth of online travel agencies and airlines and hotels’ directly
distributing through their websites.
According to a report by Kayak, a travel search engine, the travel booking habits of
majority of the people in the United Kingdom (UK), has changed extremely over the past
decade. The percentage of British people choosing high street travel agents to book their
holidays declined from 57 percent to 19 percent in the last ten years (Romero 2017). With the
rise of the online method of holiday booking, from thirty five percent to seventy-nine percent
of the people opting this method, many of the travel agents now have their own websites to
provide the booking services online. Today, more Brits are choosing to go with this online
option, as it is more convenient for them to plan and book their holidays online by browsing
through the websites of the airlines as well as hotels. Many travel companies including
Thomas Cook has significantly improved their methods of providing travelling service to

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their customer including safer option for online transaction through various channels. Apart
from this, airlines like British Airways have come up with the option of ‘Customize Your
Trip’ on their official website (Davenport 2013). This allows their customers to create and
plan holiday trips including the multi-destination ones by flexibly choosing the flights at
different airports as well as book rooms at multiple hotels throughout the duration of their
holiday.
Evaluation of how technology changed the methods of conducting business, as
compared to the old ‘Bricks and Mortar’ businesses.
Brick and Mortar (B & M) travel companies and agencies acts as brokers who
provides various travel related products and services generally offline to the public from a
certain geographical location (Pozzi 2013). These agencies being brokerages gets
commission from the clients and this acts as the main source of their income, provides
information in order to connect their customers with the travel services. With the decline in
the sale of the services from individual agents, the agencies had to witness great decline in
the annual income. With more people choosing to book their holidays online, very few are
nowadays opting to go to the B&M agencies for directly dealing with the travel agents for
their travel and holiday plans. The various services provided by the online agencies includes
preparing the clients documents and their travel route, providing the travelers with the
required support and the needed consultation and making it easier for their customers to
purchase as well as reserve their airline tickets (Inversini and Masiero 2014). Thus, with the
introduction of the internet in the travel industry, the traditional brick and mortar businesses
got threatened with the entry of the online travel agents and agencies.
Online agencies have no fixed location like the B&M agencies, thus they have low
entry and exit barriers as well as lower cost of operation. Apart from this, they also came with
the offer of online transactions and the marketing strategy of having the destination images

6INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
and videos on the website. To this, the B&M agencies reciprocated with developing and
acquiring their own websites and opening up physical stores at local locations to provide
more human-to-human contact to the customers (Kayani 2014). Moreover, with the
adaptation of the ICT in the travel industry, more travel related information became easily
accessible to the customers. A tremendous role has been played by the Computer reserve
system (CRS) or the Global distributed systems (GDS) in the travel industry over the past
decade. With the help of advanced technologies and internet facilities, the customers got
access to better negotiation power and could directly interact with their travel service
providers without the need of any intermediary. Apart from this, several other changes that
developed with the advancement of technology includes availability of reviews given by
other travelers online, various online travel related articles, option to compare the prices and
services provided by different travel agents and the option to do numerous search with
specific set of criteria. This further led the B&M agencies to provide their clients with the
options of customized services at competitive price (Chen et al. 2014).
Advantages and Disadvantages of traditional and online booking
Along with the substantial growth in the e-commerce businesses in the recent years,
the demand for the travel companies providing travel services through their websites have
increased and become more popular. One of the reasons for this growing demand is that the
online reservation systems have become more efficient with the option for the customers to
make all their travel related purchases on the internet (Guo et al. 2013). The technological
impact is felt on regular basis with most of the packaged travel trips and plans as well as
cruises still getting booked through a travel agency.
The advantage of a B&M traditional travel agency is that it turns out to be convenient
for many of their customers who instead of wasting their time searching for the information
all on their own, choose to consult a travel agent (Lee et al. 2015). These travel professionals

7INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
assists them by offering the best travel plan as well as provide further help and support during
their holiday duration. The major let down of the traditional travel agencies is the amount of
service charge that is most of the time higher than the margin provided by the online
agencies.
The advantages as well as the disadvantages of the online method to the travel agencies
as well as the customers are as follows:
 With the availability of the high-speed internet, the communication between the
agency and the clients got faster along with booking a holiday trip online faster
(Xiang, Magnini and Fesenmaier 2015). The agency’s productivity increased
sufficiently along with improvement in the customer satisfaction level.
 One of the advantages of selling travel services online is the lower maintenance
cost due to low cost it takes to maintain the agency’s website. Apart from this, the
agencies on its online web portals, allows their seasoned clients the options to
compare prices, read other customers reviews and feedback and early reservations.
 The disadvantage of online travel services is that it contains a huge amount of data
stored on its website regarding different holiday destinations and offers (Amaro
and Duarte 2013). This makes the clients who are less experienced in travelling and
holiday plans get lost with the multiple options available.
 The agencies that have low maintenance websites do not offer certain options to
their clients including help or advice services.
Critical analysis of the benefits associated with the use of mobile-apps, alerts and
mobility when selling/buying travel & tourism services.
According to a 2015 statistic, the tours and travel industry is a massive industry with
approximately 6.3 trillion dollar invested in it (Www.goodworklabs.com 2017). The major

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players to contribute to this success in the travel industry are the travel mobile apps. With the
growing collaboration between the travel industry and the technology, both have made a lot
of progress and are continuing to provide better services to the people. Today, there are
numerous apps available that enables one to do almost all the travel related activities
including booking travel, accommodations as well as availing cab services. Unlike previously
using the printed maps and guidebooks, today with help of the travel apps including Google
Maps that comes preinstalled in the mobile phones, people around the globe are enabled to
carry along with them majority of these online resources they need for their travel expeditions
( Lu et al. 2015). Apart from this, the users of these travel apps also can easily and quickly
pay for their travel online from their smartphones as well as tablet devices. These apps also
allows the users with the option to work on the go as well as remotely access all of their work
related documents, thus improving their productivity and flexibility.
The apps related to travel and tourism have been found to be the seventh most
downloaded apps by the people according to the demographic statistics. The same statistics
also shows that 60 percent of the users of smartphones globally, have downloaded and
installed certain travel apps into their phones, with 45 percent in this group using these apps
on regular basis to plan their holidays and tours directly from their mobile
(Www.goodworklabs.com 2017). The above facts, makes it clear that the travel agencies
along with time have been successfully able to make their apps’ presence strong in the market
and also have been able to reach out to more customers. Thus, in order to survive in the
competitive market of the travel and tourism industry, it has become crucial to invest in the
latest technologies including mobile apps (Dickinson 2014). These apps help the travel
agencies to attract more customers towards it by offering more friendliness and other high-
end functionalities that a normal brick and mortar agency who operate from a single street
shop.

9INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
Discussion of the security issues associated with having a web presence.
Almost all the travel agencies as well as airlines in the travel industry now have a
strong customer presence on their websites with more people choosing to book their travel
online. Unfortunately, with the increase in popularity and adaptation of the online method,
these websites have become a prime target for hackers and cybercriminals ( Millet 2015).
Majority of the time, the customer’s personal as well as financial information is put at risk as
their travel information does not get protected rightly against the various phishing attacks via
emails. Though, the travel agencies do spend a lot in marketing it services to attract potential
customers, it fails many a time in protecting them. Some of the various security issues with
having a web presence is as follows:
 The websites of the travel companies collects personal information including the
customer’s name and contact details as well as their payment mode. With any kind of
breach in the security of the website, these information can be accessed easily by the
cybercriminals leaving the customers vulnerable.
 Various online agencies and the loyalty websites either have a four digit personal
identification number (PIN) or a six character password as their only mean of
providing protection to their customer’s account. Thus, they need to implement strict
security with either two factor authentication or one time passwords sent to the
customer’s registered mobile number as security measures (Beck and Swensen 2015).
 The customers on the other hand also need to ensure that their account does not get
hacked by avoiding to use the same username and password combination on several
sites. Usage of the same combination would make it easier for the fraudster to hack all
the other accounts of the customers if he succeeds in hacking any one of the accounts
of the customers (Jansen and Leukfeldt 2015).

10INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
 Many a times, the hackers are interested to take advantage of the loyalty programs of
various brands who awards their customers reward points that are accumulated over
time and are considered equivalent to the currency (Roger-Monzó, Martí-Sánchez and
Guijarro-García 2015). They steal these accumulated reward points without getting
traced digitally. Thus, these airlines and agencies with loyalty programs needs to be
proactive with the email security to protect their customers, brand and business.
Recommendations
In order to survive and thrive in the competitive market, the travel agents are
recommended to do the following things:
 They must develop themselves as one of the specialist in providing help to the
customers to pick a certain destination for their holidays as well as give the customers
personalized service that they are seeking.
 The agents must make themselves, more experienced and unique while dealing the
clients and help them in booking complex trips.
 The agents must constantly change and adapt with the market and provide flexibility
in the travel prices and focus less on collecting the commission.
Conclusion
This report contains discussion on how the travel industry had to suffer a great deal
with public adapting to online services and new travel related technologies and in order to
counter these changes, most of the agencies have shifted their prime focus to conduct the
sales online. The agencies allowed their clients to book holiday trips online, without having
to face any kind of constraint of the working hours of the agencies or the need to manage
their own busy schedule. This report discusses the advantages and the disadvantages of both

11INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
the online and offline travel agencies and the various existing security issues related to their
websites that needs to be paid great attention to in order to ensure that their customers
information remains safe and protected from the hacker and the fraudsters. Thus, this report
concludes with a belief that the traditional high street travel agents and the brick and mortar
agencies will without a doubt remain functioning in the travel market, till the time customers
continue with the demand for the packaged holiday travels.

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